It might at first seem odd to find Ibsen's tight-structured play forming the climax to a Festival of Chaos that has already brought us The Bacchae and Blood Wedding. But Laurie Sansom's choice, as he shows in this highly intelligent production, makes total sense: not only is Hedda herself a thwarted Dionysiac whose hidden fire turns to self-destruction, but under the camouflage of naturalism, Ibsen smuggles in a wealth of poetic symbolism.

Everything, of course, hinges on Hedda, and Sansom has made an excellent choice. Emma Hamilton looks even younger than the 29-year-old whom Ibsen specified, and has the kind of refined beauty we associate with Jane Austen TV heroines. You'd almost call her demure, except that Hamilton constantly hints at Hedda's inner witch. There is a casual contempt about the way she interrupts her academic husband, Tesman, and when she confronts her despised rival, Mrs Elvsted, you are never sure whether she is going to kiss her violently on the lips or strangle her.

Above all, Hamilton reminds us Hedda has the soul of a 19th-century aesthete who cannot bear too much reality: she shudders at the dead smell of the marital home ("That bitter rot – like flowers on the turn", in Andrew Upton's pungent new version) and famously wants Eilert Lovborg to die beautifully. What I like about Hamilton is that there is nothing operatic about her Hedda: if she is a destroyer, it is because she is a mix of disappointed idealist and control freak.

Sansom's well-ordered production could make even more of the crucial moment when Tesman and Mrs Elvsted sit down to reconstruct Lovborg's lost masterpiece: a potent symbol of a future in which men and women can work together as intellectual partners. But this is a first-rate and strongly cast production. Jack Hawkins's Tesman is not the doddering fusspot we used to get but a young, properly ambitious scholar. Lex Shrapnel's Lovborg conveys all the tensions of a potential genius who lacks the self-discipline to sustain his vision, and Jay Villiers's Judge Brack is the epitome of the smug provincial lech, who sees the back entry to Hedda's house as "an enclosed run for your own proud cock". It's a measure of how attuned we've become to Ibsen's symbolism that this line gets the loudest laugh of the night.